Mar 5, 2012

Our wedding flowers were a big group effort and because we did them all ourselves we saved a ton of money. Duncan and I started the process by talking to a local restaurant, Take 5 Market, that we frequent often about saving their large cans that they normally recycle. They were awesome to set them aside for us until we had more than enough for our project. Duncan designed a label that paid homage to our animals and a few other details about us. Our dog's name is Indy and our cat's name is Olive so together they're Indy and Olive, hence the Indian Olives choice. Hooper is my new last name, our love was 'San Fran Grown' and 'canned in Seattle,' and the net weight references our wedding date, 11-5-11. The design wouldn't have been complete without a reference to our newly acquired chickens as well. We cleaned up the cans, glued the labels on and put a few coats of glossy mod podge over the top to protect the color copied image from the water from the flowers. These only cost us about 55 cents a piece - 50 cents for the color copy and a few more for the mod podge!My mom took the reigns as far as the actual flowers went. She spent a ton of time collecting and drying hydrangeas as well as wiring each little piece to wooden stakes. She had all the cans 'greened up' and ready for the fresh cut flowers to be added. As for those, we used snow berry, seeded eucalyptus, blue thistle, button mums and purple statice. We picked them up two days before the wedding and my Mom, Mother-in-Law and two of my aunts got to work out in our driveway until they were all ready to go. I bought eight different vintage labels from Antika for about a dollar a piece and printed out copies of them on glossy photo paper. I mounted the copies on copper colored card stock and added a round table number to the corner. Hope you enjoyed seeing how these came together!